do not squander love
“Love is how humans flock, love is how we murmurate. Amongst the masses, we find our people, figure out the right distance, and then we change together, and we thrive.”
It’s just a bit past 8 PM, but it’s middle-of-the-night dark outside. Lola is curled up next to me on the sofa, a stuffed toy clutched between her paw and her chin. I wrote a lot today, which makes me happy, even though it was all for work, had a delightful informational interview with a guy in Dubuque about community storytelling, got technical help from a generous friend, enjoyed dinner with my mom and Tobey, and talked with Bella about good news she received. Now, I’m here in the quiet thinking about love.
I’ve been thinking about it for a few days — about how fleeting it is, how difficult to find and to hold, no matter how good your intentions are. All of that country music stuff because, yes, my heart is bruised at the moment. It pisses me off that love is at a premium in our world. We’re all so in need of it, and yet we withhold it. We even monetize it and put it through algorithms! The scarcity model: love too freely given is dangerous or foolish. But when we turn on the love faucet and let it flow, those who get watered by it are nourished, they grow, they prosper and give it back! It’s sunshine—no less than sunshine.
The other night I watched the documentary My Name Is Pauli Murray and was struck by what happened when a brilliant, fierce human was deeply loved - something that happened just twice in their life. A legal firebrand whose thinking influenced many of the rights we are currently trying to hold on to, Murray was born in a mixed race family in 1910, Pauli was orphaned at a young age and then adopted by an aunt who loved them unconditionally, allowing them to dress in pants at a time when that was uncommon, and calling Pauli her ‘girlboy’. I sensed that the autonomy and assurance of her love that the aunt provided the child — and later the adult — gave Pauli the confidence to express themselves, to trust themselves, to love themselves.
They took up a typewriter and fearlessly took on the Jim Crow South, FDR, multiple major universities, and anyone or anything with which they disagreed. In 1950, fifteen years before becoming the first African American to get a law degree from Yale, Murray published a book, States' Laws on Race and Color, that Thurgood Marshall said was the “bible” of the Civil Rights movement. They became a lifelong friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, having won the first lady’s confidence through years of correspondence that began by attacking FDR’s timidity on race policy. One of the founders of NOW, Murray contributed so deeply to Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s arguments on the 1971 Supreme Court case that extended the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause to women, that the future icon added Murray’s name as a co-author.
None of this brilliance, however, was protection from loneliness and marginalization. On multiple occasions, Murray was hospitalized for severe depression. If you’ve been deeply depressed, you know this means that everything stops. Your work is derailed. Your ability to keep your basic daily life going is derailed. It’s a painful experience one time, but to cycle in and out is exhausting and frightening. Murray was able to get out of this cycle after she found love with Renee Barlow. The two never lived together and couldn’t comfortably call each other partners, much less be married, but they cared for each other in multiple ways.
The love — that unconditional sunshine — provided Murray with the necessary nourishment to rise to their full capabilities, producing legal thinking, poetry, and other writing that were ahead of their time in terms of LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and a vision for a more racially diverse country. Pauli Murray obviously had an extraordinary mind. But love was a necessary ingredient for the happiness and inner peace that allowed them to share that brilliance with the world.
There are so many people walking around with the pain and doubt that come from being unloved or even under-loved. Such a simple and overused word, love, and yet it is truly elemental to our well-being and our ability to evolve into best selves. Whenever I have a chance to be in a classroom, I always pause and wonder which students feel unloved, which ones are struggling for lack of this element. In the moment, I wish them all love and hope that even fleetingly they feel their lovableness to be true.
I am hardly unloved — I have a flock of amazing, loyal, dear friends from whom I receive extraordinary love and to who I’m equally as privileged to give it. I have a close family, and am especially thankful for my two kids with whom I’ve had a life of practicing deep love, the kind of love that asks “how high?” the kind of love that stays up all night, the kind of love that jumps on a plane if needed, the kind of love that doesn’t admonish. And yet, I wonder if my life would look different, especially if my work and what I’m able to produce for this world, if I were nourished in that particular kind of sunshine.
Love is a practice. Every day we have a new opportunity to look at the world through loving eyes. To feel awe in nature, tenderness toward each person we encounter, soft regard for our own wounded parts. Every day is an act of giving and receiving. We must work at this, each of us, for it is love that will bring out the brilliance our world so desperately needs.
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Words
by Pauli Murray
We are spendthrifts with words,
We squander them,
Toss them like pennies in the air —
Arrogant words,
Angry words,
Cruel words,
Comradely words,
Shy words tiptoeing from mouth to ear.
But the slowly wrought words of love
And the thunderous words of heartbreak —
These we hoard.
